I
teach at a boarding school, and a few years ago, one of my freshman advisees asked a seemingly innocent question during one of our first meetings. I was still learning the scores of new names teachers must match with faces each fall, but Molly’s inquiry made her stand out from the other students: “What question should I ask, and what’s the answer?”
I vaguely remember replying that I’d have to give her question some thought, but I’d be sure to get back to her. As a bit of playfulness, the matter might have ended there. But Molly brought up the question again, almost every time we saw each other in fact, and it soon became a kind of inside joke. She graduated before I wrote this, but she’s on Facebook, so I’ll be sending this along to her, only half a decade late.
Ideally, teaching and learning invite questions. Good questions distinguish students who are thinking well, and they can move classes in rich and unforeseen directions. Good students and teachers distinguish themselves by the mileage they can get out of each other’s questions. How often I’ve shut students down by dismissing a question out of lack of time, answering it poorly, not hearing it as it was intended, or deferring it in the face of “more important things” and ultimately forgetting it. A class often comes alive with student questions. They break up a teacher monolog, and — better, often, than teacher questions — reveal student thinking, which may well be superior to anything the teacher has planned for the day. For me, following wherever such questions lead at least once a week has proven worth the time again and again.
For questions imply answers. Insofar as it can be put into language, a desire to know carries the seeds of its own response. Often we already “know” much of what an answer should “look like” – which some might say is a problem, because it conditions the kinds of answers we can receive, or those we will devote the most energy looking for. When the man searching for his lost key is asked why he’s looking under a streetlight, he replies, “Because that’s where the light is.”
If we ask simple informational questions, such as “What time is it?” we already know a great deal about the form of the answer. “Half a cup” or “Poughkeepsie” or “grayish green” won’t do for answers in this case. “Not yet” edges somewhat closer, since it has at least something to do with time. “4:18 pm” serves very well, whether or not it’s accurate, because it has the form of the kind of answer we seek. So it satisfies the formal requirement without necessarily satisfying the content requirement.
In the case of “large” questions, though, it can be more difficult to recognize whether an answer even satisfies the formal requirement. But as The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy insinuates, though we may have an answer, even one as specific as 42, without its “inciting” question to steady and direct it like a rudder on a boat, an answer by itself may not help us very much.
Mary Oliver notes in one of her poems, “there are so many questions more beautiful than answers.” Living in our questions is one way to keep a spiritual search alive. Resist the craving for an answer too soon. In her poem “Spring,” she asserts, “‘There is only one question:/how to love this world.” The biggest questions may not have an “answer” in any sense we expect or demand, but they may nonetheless propel us in necessary or powerful directions, ones we need to travel.
Molly’s inquiry is a meta-question – a question about questions. It asks about quality. It also assumes the listener might know more than the speaker, at least about questions and their answers. It implies that another can recognize – and provide – good or worthwhile questions worth asking, can anticipate the kinds of questions you may have, and has good answers.
Now all of this is unfair to load onto a probably offhand and casually teasing question. But by continuing to ask it, Molly slowly transformed it into a kind of riddle or meditation object, deepening its significance. What a lesson there!
One kind of answer to that question is also a general one, and sounds like advice for someone setting out on a journey: ask the best kinds of questions you can, and trust that you also need to seek out your own answers. Those anyone else can supply, except for day-to-day matters, aren’t really worth your time, except as provisional responses, first approximations to the answers you can best provide for yourself. Question authority, because some sacred cows stopped giving milk a long time ago. Question authority to find out if that authority deserves the name — does it feed you stock answers, or does it actually possess the power to lead you toward your own answers? And better, authorize questions — encourage yourself, and others, to keep asking.
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Image: cartoon
A Druid Way 
